Sure the bandwidth/storage costs matters, but they are a fraction of the cost of a physical good.

On popular marketplaces and streaming services (Google Play, Spotify, Netflix...), you are paying either on a per-file (e.g. you download an app) or on a per-access basis (you pay X€ a month to access a library).

Paying per-file is usually easier to reason about: you pay 10€, the marketplace keeps X% and gives the rest back to the file creator.

I can't emphasize enough how much both models sucks, both for content creators and comsumers.

In both, the service holds a huge amount of power:

- It can remove a content at any time, for any reason.- Because it receives the money in the first place, it can also increase its cut whenever it wants.- Because of the centralization of content and consumers on a handful of services, creators have usually no leverage to negociate better conditions.

Regardless of the good or bad behaviour of the actors operating those models, I believe paying to access content is an issue in itself, as it means people without money or a credit card cannot access the content.

And because the act of paying is enforced by the distributors, all the content is hosted on the internet, in silos, and it is not replicated elsewhere.

The way I see it, most if not all of Those issues comes from fear: creators that publish their content on those services are afraid people will consume their content without giving back anything to them.

And this is quite understandable. When you work hard on something, you want to know it will give you financial security in the future, so you can focus on other projects.

- How much the creator will get from my purchase? 10%? 20%? What a shame.- The creator already gets a lot of money, I'd rather give that money to someone with less resources.- I want to support the creator, but I don't really care about the CD/File/Game/Whatever

1. We have a network of content servers (Peertube, Funkwhale, MediaGoblin instances...). Those servers are hosting and replicating the content (music, videos, whatever), making it available on the internet, *for free* (this is important)2. Creators publish their content on those servers3. Creators define needs/goals in a standardized way. Those are also made available publicly

(3. Could be based on ActivityPub, but let's focus on the bigger picture here)

Sample needs could be:

- Receiving 500€ a week for my work on X- Get help to organize a concert in town Y- Get user feedback about my new project Z so I can fix the last issues- Receive 1500€ to finance my next video project

As a creator, you could share various channels to get your financial contributions: a Liberapay account, a Ğ1 or Bitcoin address, an IBAN, a PayPal account, a Patreon or Tipeee page, a Flattr address...

Finally, and it's probably the most important thing to me, money is not required to access culture anymore (which is quite antisocial, when you think about it).

All the burden of managing DRM systems, access control, complex royalties scheme, all the piracy guilt and shame, all of the projects that died by lack of audience and could have work, all of this become irrelevant.

6: a lot of people view centralization as inherently bad. But it is also inherently more efficiently. Especially when it comes to competing for attention on the open market.

Why not just have the creators and audience own some of that centralization. That way together they can complete against the Disney’s, Googles, and Marvels of the world but also have a transparent and equitable system for distribution.

@eliotberriot@rbenjamin@Stoori This pretty much sounds like Liberapay, or public radio here in the US, in that the content is distributed for free and people pay whatever feels right. The new aspect appears to be that consumers are funding specific goals. So, basically, it's many-to-many crowdfunding. Right?

@eliotberriot@rbenjamin@Stoori I like this idea, though I can't contribute anything at a technical level. I can see, however, that it would have to be very flexible. It would have to include all manner of media, genres, languages, currencies, and so on. It would almost amount to a trade network.

@Steve@Stoori@rbenjamin not necessarily if the network focuses on being a way for creators to express their needs and for users to forward their contributions to the proper place.

The network itself does not have to handle the transactions. Individual apps can integrate directly with various API/Payment providers for that, delagating this work to external services that will do it much better.